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UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS 



aSg tije .Same "Eutftor: 

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME. 
»-r— 

ON THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 

Contains so many wise suggestions concerning methods 
in study and so excellent a Summary of the nature and 
principles of a really liberal education that it well deserves 
publication for the benefit of the reading public. — The 
Library Journal. 

ON HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF 
HISTORY. 

" No one should be discouraged from studying History. 
Its greatest service is not so much to increase our knowl- 
edge as to stimulate thought and broaden our intellectual 
horizon ; and for this purpose no study is its equal." 

PRICE, 50 CENTS EACH. 



ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers. 



THE 



STUDY OF POLITICS 



&n Introtjuctorg lecture 



BY 






WILLIAM P. ATKINSON 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY IN THE MASSACHUSETTS 
INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 







22 '888 7") 



BOSTON 
ROBERTS BROTHERS 






Copyright, 1888, 
By William P. Atkinson. 



©m'&msttg press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



NOTE. 

The following Lecture grew out of an introduction to 
a course on Constitutio?ial History given to the Senior Class 
at the Institute of Technology, and has been read at that 
admirable institution, the Boston Young Men's Christian 
Union, and elsewhere. In now printing it, the writer 
desires to be alone held responsible for the opinions it 
contains. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 



That learned historian Professor Freeman has 
gone so far as to say that " History is only past 
politics, politics only present history." The state- 
ment has perhaps as much truth in it as such epi- 
grammatic statements usually have ; but it would 
be' just as true to say that history is past religion, 
and religion is present history, or history is past 
political economy, or past art, or past science, — for 
all these come within a true and broad view of the 
scope of history. If, indeed, for the word " poli- 
tics" the word " sociology " were to be substituted, 
the statement would be true enough ; but that is a 
word which I suppose nothing could possibly in- 
duce Professor Freeman to use, and it cannot be de- 
nied that his version is true of history as commonly 
written. History as commonly written is too ex- 
clusively the story of the rise and fall of govern- 
ments, of political struggle and political revolution ; 
so that the genuine student of the subject will miss 



8 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

the profit of the greater part of his historical read- 
ing who does not come to it prepared with some 
general knowledge of the theory of political science. 
It is as if he tried to pursue his engineering studies 
without having first mastered the calculus. 

It is not, however, because the science of politics 
is one main key to the study of the history of the 
past that I want to fix your attention upon it to- 
day. It has a stronger practical claim than that. 
The study of politics is a 'young man's necessary 
preparation for the intelligent performance of his 
duties as a citizen and a voter; it is a young 
woman's necessary preparation for contributing 
her share to the formation of an intelligent public 
opinion, to the doing of her duty as sister, as 
mother, as wife, and as friend, to help, and even 
to constrain, if need be, the masculine voter to 
keep always in the path of patriotism and duty. 
Now, is it not a little strange that an idea should 
be so prevalent among men who boast of being 
" practical " that however it may be with other 
kinds of knowledge, political knowledge is of a 
kind that comes by nature or by instinct or by 
reading newspapers? It is not always the poli- 
ticians of the corner-groceries, — who are also 
" practical," — but often men who should know 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 



9 



better, who are fond of calling students of the sub- 
ject " literary fellows " and " kid-glove politicians ; " 
and we all know, for we in Massachusetts have 
had excellent opportunity for observing, how im- 
pudent and unscrupulous demagogues can trade 
in this w r ay on the ignorance and prejudices of 
voters. But I think that a change is fast being 
forced upon us in respect to this matter of political 
education which is quite parallel with the change 
that is coming over the subject of scientific educa- 
tion. While the country was small and the people 
few in number, it may be admitted that their gen- 
eral intelligence could pretty safely be depended 
on for the proper guidance of public affairs, — just 
as while our buildings were small they were built 
by carpenters who had small pretensions to archi- 
tectural knowledge, or when our roads were simple, 
the farmers worked out their own road-tax, while 
their wives and daughters plied the spinning-wheel 
or wove the homespun. But it takes something 
more than the carpenter's rule-of-thumb to erect 
the vast structures of to-day. The village me- 
chanic could build the old village meeting-house; 
but it requires an architect, and a good one, to 
build Trinity yonder. The farmers cannot turn out 
with pick and shovel to build a railroad, — that 



IO THE STUDY OF POLITICS, 

takes an engineer; while nobody but that crack- 
brained man of genius Mr. Ruskin makes any at- 
tempt nowadays to restore the spinning-wheel, or 
thinks of railing at a cotton-mill. 

Precisely such a change has come over us in 
respect to politics. They can no longer be con- 
ducted by rule-of-thumb ; our political interests 
are too vast, our unprincipled demagogues too 
numerous and too dangerous. It took our fathers 
comparatively little trouble to find out Washington 
and place him at the head of affairs, to find out 
Adams and Hamilton and Madison and Marshall. 
They had not so many good men to pick from, 
nor so many rogues to fear. It takes all that 
honest men can do to put competent men into 
office nowadays, and too often the problem is too 
much for them. How can the hands of honest 
men be strengthened? I know of but one sure 
way, and that is by the spread of sound political 
knowledge. Suppose that each one of you were to 
resolve that as far as in him lay he would learn to 
know his duties as a citizen as well as he means 
to know his business as a chemist, an architect, or 
an engineer, — to know his duties, and to have ideas 
and to stand by them, —you would not fail to find 
yourselves, through the possession of such knowl- 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. II 

edge and such independence, in a position of 
commanding influence in whatever circle you 
might move ; for, as Stuart Mill well says, " One 
man with a conviction is stronger than ten who 
have only interests. " At the meeting in Boston 
at the opening of the last Presidential campaign 
called to protest against the discreditable Repub- 
lican nomination for President, I could not but 
admire the position of the man who made the chief 
speech of the occasion. He was not a professional 
politician, he was a clergyman ; but one who thinks 
it a part of his clerical duty openly and on all 
occasions to take what he conceives to be the side 
of truth and honesty and righteousness in politics. 
It was cheering to observe the weight which his 
simple words carried with them, coming as they 
did from a man whom everybody respected, and 
who throughout his long life has never been want- 
ing in the courage of his convictions, though he 
has never sought political distinction. 1 It was the 
case of an honest and fearless man coming simply 
forward to do his political duty at a moment when 
he was privileged to exercise a great influence, 
because the words of honest and fearless men were 
greatly needed. But it is the influence which each 

1 Rev. James F. Clarke, D.D. 



12 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

one of us is bound to exercise all through his life, 
whether his influence be a great or a small one ; 
and we cannot exert it rightly without political 
knowledge. 

You will perceive at once that I am myself a 
" mugwump." Let me say here at the very out- 
set that in this lecture and in those that will follow 
I purpose to express my own honest convictions 
in as plain and forcible a manner as my command 
of the English language will allow; and I shall do 
this whether my illustrations shall chance to be 
drawn from questions long since settled, or from 
the political issues of the day. But I need not say 
to you who know me that in no case shall I do it 
in order that I may make you proselytes to my 
own opinions, but that I may teach you, by exam- 
ple as well as precept, to practise the duty and 
to exercise the right of speaking and thinking 
independently yourselves. 

I say, then, that it is every man's duty to study 
politics, — yes, and every woman's too ; " to go into 
politics," — though that phrase, I know, has a very 
bad sound, — to go overhead and ears into politics. 
And yet I am quite aware that very honest men 
take a different view. " I don't care for politics," 
I hear some one say, " and I don't intend to med- 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 13 

die with them ; I leave them to the politicians. I 
shall be too busy with honest work. Politics are 
a dirty business at best, infested with rogues and 
rascals; " and the statement is lamentably true. 

Now, it cannot be denied that honest men take 
this ground. I have known good men who made 
it a boast that they had never cast a vote in all 
their lives ; and many a man who does vote thinks 
it a very meritorious sacrifice to interrupt his pri- 
vate business in order to go to the polls. And I 
could not have a better illustration of the impor- 
tance of right ideas in politics ; for such men, 
whether consciously or not, are acting upon a false 
political theory, one that is as mischievous as it is 
widespread, though they probably have never taken 
the trouble to state it in so many words. Formu- 
lated in words, it would be something like this : 
Society is made up of independent individuals, 
each one of w r hom is free to act as he pleases, pro- 
vided he takes care not to infringe on the right of 
everybody else to do the same ; what we call " gov- 
ernment" is only a sort of street constable to pre- 
vent such infringements, — a necessary nuisance; 
and the less of it we have, the better. So long as it 
goes reasonably well, a quiet man had better let it 
alone and attend to his own affairs. It is full of 



14 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

inevitable abuses ; but unless they grow intolerable, 
he is not called upon to interfere. 

Now, you see this is a theory of politics, a po- 
litical philosophy, — though, as I shall try to show, 
a very wrong one ; and the result is to belittle the 
subject in the minds of those who hold it. The 
independence of the individual being the all-impor- 
tant point, it is of much less consequence, such men 
think, in what way the individuals combine to- 
gether. One form may have certain advantages 
over another, but on the whole, Pope's lines ex- 
press the true philosophy of the matter : — 

" For forms of government let fools contest ; 
Whate'er is best administered is best." 

The main point is the efficient constable : " Let 
the fools struggle to be made Presidents and 
Governors and Congressmen, I," says such a man, 
"have more serious work on hand. I will attend 
to my business and leave them to squabble for 
place, even if they do plunder me by taxation. If 
that goes too far, I suppose I must help ' turn the 
rascals out/ " 

I am afraid this is the working political theory 
of many a respectable man who would be sur- 
prised to be told that it is the product of a false 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 15 

political philosophy. He would probably disclaim 
having any philosophy ; nevertheless he is acting 
upon a theory, and one which starts with a false 
premise. His doctrine begins with the supposi- 
tion that the political unit of calculation is the 
individual. There will be plenty to say before we 
get through about the liberty of the individual and 
the famous doctrine of the rights of man; but in 
my judgment the liberty of the individual is not 
the starting-point of political speculation, and to 
show that the man w T ho, on such grounds as I have 
described, declines to meddle with politics is neg- 
lecting one of the greatest of life's duties, I have 
only to contrast this view with a truer one. 

It would be much nearer the truth to say that, 
politically speaking, the individual standing by 
himself, instead of being the unit of political cal- 
culation, is nothing, is zero. To be convinced of 
this, try in imagination to strip yourselves of all 
that part of you which has been created and devel- 
oped by your surroundings, and see how little is 
left. To begin with, you came into existence not 
alone in a wilderness, but are the offspring of parents 
and surrounded by relatives who in like manner 
had been born into an already organized society 
and formed a part of a larger collection of human 



1 6 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

beings, — a village, a State, a nation. Thus we are 
born right into a whole network of relations to men 
and things and institutions, involving duties to all 
sorts of people and surroundings ; and it is almost 
entirely because these people and surroundings were 
what they were that you are what you are. Sup- 
pose that instead of being born, say in a New Eng- 
land city, you had been born in a Turcoman tent 
or a Hottentot kraal : it is obvious that instead 
of growing up a certain sort of New Englander, 
better or worse, you would have grown up a cer- 
tain sort of Turcoman or Hottentot, better or 
worse ; and instead of studying the calculus at the 
Institute of Technology, you would now be riding 
a horse and hurling a spear with the Turcomans, 
or grubbing for worms for your dinner with the 
Hottentots. If men, instead of coming into exist- 
ence together, should come into existence abso- 
lutely isolated and alone, they are such a feeble 
folk that they would all instantly perish. 

This boasted individuality, therefore, appears 
from this point of view to be an illusion. Instead 
of society being made up of a collection of in- 
dependent self-sufficing units, it turns out to be 
composed of, so to speak, nothing but individual 
bundles of relations, whose very individuality itself 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 1 7 

is dependent on these relations to surrounding 
individuals. It is idle to talk of taking ourselves 
out of these relations ; they make us what we are. 
Strip us of them, and we are nothing. We realize 
our true individuality only to the degree that we 
recognize these relations to others and perform 
their accompanying duties. One might as well 
talk of jumping off his shadow, or out of his skin, 
as of getting rid of them. 1 

The theoretical error, therefore, of our friend who 
is unwilling to meddle with politics is obvious. 
He is setting up for himself and trying to live 
alone ; he might just as well try to go up in a bal- 
loon. It is as though he were to say, " I don't 
meddle with eating. Eating is a very troublesome 
business, and involves a deal of dirty work. I will 
have nothing to do with it; I am too busy." But 
we know that in this case certain physiological 
consequences soon begin to appear. Our abste- 
mious friend's person would be attenuated ; his 

1 A man cannot be truly called a citizen of a State or of the 
world unless he feels himself included in this unbroken chain of 
the temporal development of humanity, endowed with innumerable 
benefits won for him by past generations, and hence bound body 
and soul to the historical whole, without which his whole existence 
would be unthinkable, and whose unfinished work he is called upon 
to develop further by his own activity and intelligence. — Lotze, 
Microcosmus, Eng. tr., vol. i. p. ioo. 

2 



1 8 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

bodily strength would diminish ; and pretty soon, 
if he did not take a little time from his business 
and devote it to his dinner, his business and he 
would part company forever. Well, many a man 
who is not so foolish as to starve his body is quite 
ready to starve the State, not seeing that he is 
equally, and even in a higher sense, dependent on 
its health for his own prosperity. He is willing to 
ignore the most important of those relations to 
others which make him What he is, — at least he is 
willing to try to reap all the advantages those rela- 
tions bring him, — at the same time that he neglects 
all the duties they impose. If his doctrine is true 
for him, it is true for others; and if everybody 
followed it, society would perish, the State would 
starve. Nothing is clearer than that if a man is 
pretty much w r hat his relations to others make him, 
those relations impose on him duties exactly com- 
mensurate with his privileges. The man who 
neglects his political duties is as much a moral 
suicide as he would be physically a suicide if he 
starved himself. 

This subordination of the individual to society, 
his dependence on it for the development of all 
that he really is, might be illustrated by your posi- 
tion as students of physical science. What is it to 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 1 9 

be a student of science? Is it to start out each on 
an independent course to make new scientific dis- 
coveries, and in that sense to be individual? You 
very well know that individuality of that sort would 
go but very little way. Instead of that, you find 
yourselves set down to the task of mastering, to 
the best of your ability, a great body of already 
discovered and organized scientific knowledge. 
You have got to make yourselves members of the 
scientific body, citizens, so to speak, of the scien- 
tific State, by mastering that knowledge, not by 
starting out alone to see what you can discover 
for yourselves. You must patiently traverse the 
whole length of the great highways of knowledge 
already opened before you can reach that unknown 
region where there is any chance of your being 
discoverers. And the scientific college stands in 
the same relation to you as a scientific student in 
which the State stands to you as a citizen ; only by 
obediently availing yourself to the utmost of all its 
opportunities can you hope to get any personal 
and individual advantage. And what is a scientific 
college but the representative, in its libraries and 
laboratories and text-books and professors, of the 
accumulated scientific knowledge of the past, 
slowly organized into a form in which it can be 



20 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

communicated to you ? From Euclid and Aristotle, 
down through generation after generation of seekers 
after scientific truth, through Galileo and Newton, 
through Lyell and Faraday and Cuvier and Darwin 
and thousands of lesser men exploring Nature in 
every direction, the great world of scientific knowl- 
edge has for generations been in process of dis- 
covery and organization; and it is through these 
doors that you are trying to get admission, and 
become, as it were, citizens of this world. But it 
cannot be done by wilfully isolating yourself, or 
wilfully taking your own course ; but by obediently 
following that beaten path which the experience of 
the past has marked out for you. You might con- 
ceivably take up geometry after your own fashion 
and rediscover all the propositions of Euclid. 
Something like that was done once by a youth who 
had never heard of Euclid. The binomial theorem 
has been rediscovered ; you might perhaps re- 
invent the calculus. But what would be the use? 
Why leap fences and ditches when there is a high- 
road to travel? On the other hand, if you do not 
diligently travel that, you will never come to your 
journey's end. A well-known self-educated in- 
ventor, 1 who had originated some really ingenious 
* The late S. P. Ru£ 






THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 21 

machines, told me once that he should have been 
saved months and years of useless labor if he could 
have had access to an Institute of Technology 
when as a young man he was blindly groping his 
way to the valuable inventions he at last succeeded 
in perfecting. 

And when you have come to the end of your 
scientific training, what is it you have accom- 
plished but the establishing of a new set of relations, 
internal and external, — internal relations with the 
world of scientific thought and scientific knowledge, 
and, consequent on these, new external relations 
with the world of life and action? I leave out of 
view for the present the internal mental and moral 
change of some sort that has been going on all the 
time ; I want you to look at the changed external 
relations that have been brought about by the ac- 
quisition of all this new knowledge and these new 
capacities which have made you different beings 
from what you were. You have come in contact 
with the world of knowledge at a great many new 
points, and thus indefinitely enlarged your field 
of action ; and you have done it, not by asserting 
your independence and living in the woods, but 
by multiplying your connections. If liberty were 
really getting free of relations to others, you have 



22 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

all this time been making yourselves slaves ; but 
in reality you enlarge your freedom by the addi- 
tion of every new relation you form through your 
new knowledge and new capacity. 

Let me give a concrete illustration of what I 
mean. There was here some years ago a young 
man, the son of a friend of mine who w r as a grocer 
in a country village ; and when I first knew him, 
the son was driving the wagon and tending store. 
I persuaded his father to send him here; and he is 
now, through the scientific knowledge he acquired 
here, in a very responsible position in a large 
manufacturing establishment. If he had stayed at 
home he w T ould probably have still been driving 
his father's wagon, and in course of time would per- 
haps have inherited his father's business. I do not 
say that that would have been a bad thing. It is 
an honest business, and would probably have given 
him a good living. I do not say that it was better 
for him to come here simply because he is prob- 
ably earning more money than he could have 
earned if he had stayed at home. I do not put it 
on that ground. But I think it was better for him 
to come here, because by coming here he became 
more of a man, because his sphere of action was en- 
larged, and his mental vision indefinitely extended. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 23 

He can thus put more life and a higher kind of life 
into a day or a year than he possibly could have 
done as a village grocer. But this wider sphere, 
and the greater freedom that goes with it, is gained 
by increasing, not by diminishing, the number and 
complexity of his relations to others. 

Now, what is true in education is just as true 
in politics. The freest man is not the red Indian in 
the woods, but the man most closely involved in 
the network of the most complex society. The 
doctrine of Rousseau is the negation of all true 
political science. The civilized man is the only 
freeman ; and he is free just in proportion as he 
is civilized. Which is freer to lead the true life of 
a human being, — a citizen of Boston, surrounded 
by the accumulated results of two centuries of 
progress, schools, colleges, libraries, museums, art- 
galleries, a city which is, as it were, a great house 
full of luxuries and conveniences, and furnishing 
opportunity for the most diversified activities; or 
the isolated squatter in the Western backwoods, 
deprived of all these? And yet here he is bound 
on every hand by governmental restraint. Does he 
enlarge his real freedom by retiring to the forest? 

I met a humorous friend the other day who 
seemed much disturbed in his mind. " They call 



24 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

this a free country," he said; " but I shall have 
to move. I can't even kill my own cat. I put her 
in a bag, and was proceeding to drown her in the 
pond, when a policeman met me, and declared it 
was against the law to throw cats into the pond. 
I took her home again, and was proceeding to 
shoot her in my back-yard, when another police- 
man interfered, and declared it was against the law 
to shoot cats in back-yards. So I went to the 
apothecary's to buy some poison ; but the apoth- 
ecary, eying me sternly, inquired if I had a phy- 
sician's prescription authorizing him to sell me 
poison. I assured him that I was contemplating 
neither homicide nor suicide, but only felicide. But 
it would not do ; I shall have to keep that cat. And 
you call this a land of freedom ! " But my friend 
is really a good citizen, and knows very well that 
the highest civilization brings with it the necessity 
for the greatest amount and greatest complexity of 
governmental restraint. And of all political theo- 
ries, that is the most false which starts with the 
assumption that government is a necessary evil, to 
be reduced to its lowest terms. 1 

1 This view, that the only business of Law is to prevent interfer- 
ence with the liberty of the individual, has gained undue favor on 
account of the real reforms to which it has led. The laws which 
it has helped to get rid of were really mischievous, but mischiev- 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 25 

But the more complex the organization, the 
more numerous the duties and responsibilities it 
brings with it. If everybody performed all his 
duties, society would be perfect; if everybody 
neglected them, society would go all to pieces. 
In point of fact, society goes well or ill according 
as the number of those who perform all their social 
duties is greater or less than the number of those 
who neglect them. And as there is in every com- 
munity an element of rascality which represents 
the disease of the body politic, honest and patriotic 
men not only have to do their fair share of politi- 
cal duty, but have the added labor of constant war- 

ous for further reasons than those conceived by the supporters of 
the theory. Having done its work, the theory now tends to be- 
come obstructive, because, in fact, advancing civilization brings 
with it more and more interference with the liberty of the indi- 
vidual to do as he likes, and this theory affords a reason for resist- 
ing all positive reforms, all reforms which involve an action of the 
State in the way of promoting conditions favorable to moral life. 
It is one thing to say that the State in promoting these conditions 
must take care not to defeat its true end by narrowing the region 
within which the spontaneity and disinterestedness of true morality 
can have play; another thing to say that it has no moral end to 
serve at all, and that it goes beyond its province when it seeks to 
do more than secure the individual from violent interference by 
other individuals. — Prof. T. H. Green, Principles of Political Obli- 
gation, Works, vol. ii. p. 345. 

See also Huxley's critique of Herbert Spencer in his Essay en- 
titled " Administrative Nihilism." 



26 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

fare with rogues and incapables, in order to prevent 
society from perishing, as it inevitably does when 
the rogues and incapables get the upper hand. 
Hence the absolute necessity to the safety of the 
State of multiplying the number of honest and 
energetic men and women ; and as honesty and 
energy are of little avail without knowledge, there 
comes the still greater necessity of educating hon- 
est men and women in political knowledge. I do 
not think it is because .the bulk of our voters 
are politically dishonest that they are led by the 
nose by plausible demagogues, it is because they 
are politically ignorant. The knavish demagogue 
sinks into obscurity as soon as he is found out, as 
may be seen by the example of more than one 
American " statesman " now living in modest re- 
tirement. The difficulty is that there is constantly 
a new crop of them, with new sets of political 
quackeries and swindles. The only remedy for 
political as for medical quackery is better education. 
But let us return to our friend who minds his 
own business and does not meddle with politics. 
He may still urge that there are plenty of men in 
the community who are fond of politics, and go 
into them because they like them. Why cannot 
he, he asks, a quiet man who does not like them, 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 27 

leave politics to them? And of course if going 
into politics means going in for office, — which is 
all the idea many men have of going into politics, 
— we do not want to disturb our quiet man unless 
the country should absolutely require his services. 
But to know whether we can dispense with him, we 
must examine a little into the character of these 
men to whom he is so willing to leave the affairs of 
the community, — the men who are said to be fond 
of politics, and who enter political life because they 
like it. They may easily be classified. There is 
first the army of office-seekers, — the men who care 
little for the country, but much for the loaves and 
fishes. If they get them, they will perhaps be 
reasonably honest, at least so long as there is no 
danger of being found out; but their interest in 
public affairs is merely personal and selfish. They 
are blind adherents of the party that put them in 
so long as the party is triumphant ; they are per- 
fectly willing to go over to the other side if they 
can get a chance when the party is defeated. I 
knew such a man once. When we were young he 
was at first a warm Abolitionist; but Abolitionism 
did not pay in those days, — its only pay was in 
kicks and curses. So he went over to the Pro- 
slavery Democrats, who were then in power; and 



28 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

as he was an effective stump-orator, — that is to say, 
he had a gift of saying nothing in a great many 
sonorous and imposing words, — his apostasy was 
rewarded by the gift of a fat office, for which he 
was entirely unfit, and which he held for many 
years. When the war came, and his party was 
overwhelmingly defeated, he had just time to jump 
on to the Republican car and come out a flaming 
patriot, — he who had been for years a servile tool 
of the slaveholders ! And in that character he took 
the stump, and his gift of empty talk, which he 
has in unlimited measure, again secured him an 
unimportant place with a large salary ; for having 
no talent but that of wirepulling and " orating," 
he could never rise to a position of any real im- 
portance. He has just been turned out; for this 
time he did not jump quick enough, — and indeed 
President Cleveland would have had no use for such 
a man, — and he has probably retired for good to 
the shades of private life. But not, you see, without 
having made a pretty good thing of politics ; for 
he has been for many years in receipt of a large 
salary, now from one party, now from the other, 
nominally for public service, really for being what 
is sometimes called a " worker; " that is to say, a 
servile party tool. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 29 

Now, I think it is pretty clear that it would not 
be safe for our quiet man to leave political affairs 
in the hands of this class of men who are fond of 
politics, and go into them because they like them. 
They are the tools of profligate factions, the baser 
elements and instruments of " rings." And yet 
their name is legion ; they are the great danger 
of republican institutions. 

But it will be contended that there is a much 
higher class than this, a class who seek in poli- 
tics an adequate field for really great abilities ; a 
class who are actuated, not by love of money or of 
money's worth, but by love of power. These men 
enter the political arena because in it they see room 
for the satisfaction of that ambition which Milton 
calls the " last infirmity of noble mind," — the am- 
bition to rule, and the fame and glory it brings 
with it. And when this ambition is coupled with 
unbending integrity and lofty patriotism it may in- 
deed make a great hero and a great man. But when 
these great abilities are not combined with a patri- 
otism and an integrity as great, you get the most 
dangerous of men, men who may indeed be in- 
struments of much good service, services great in 
proportion to their great abilities, but who can 
never be depended on in times of trial. Such a 



30 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

man was Daniel Webster, a man gifted by Provi- 
dence with marvellous intellectual abilities, one of 
the greatest brains I suppose that this country 
ever produced ; a man who in his prime did the 
nation great service as the interpreter and defender 
of the true meaning of the Constitution; but a 
man who failed us in the day of trial because his 
motives were not pure. His ambition was not to 
serve his country at any personal sacrifice: his 
highest ambition was to 'be made President; and 
the slaveholders had only to dangle the glittering 
bait before his eyes to induce him to be false to 
the cause of freedom, and so his great light went 
out in darkness. The personal vices of the man 
had degraded the statesman, for they were such 
as were inconsistent with patriotism or with in- 
dividual independence. 

Thus sadly wrote our noble old Quaker^poet of 
our "lost leader:" — 

" Revile him not, — the Tempter hath 
A snare for all ; 
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 
Befit his fall! 

- "Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage, 
When he who might 
Have lighted up and led his age, 
Falls back in night. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 31 

" Of all we loved and honored, naught 
Save power remains, — 
A fallen angel's pride of thought, 
Still strong in chains. 

" All else is gone ; from those great eyes 
The soul has fled : 
When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
The man is dead ! 

"Then pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame ! " 

Ambition is not a motive power to be depended 
on. If the world needed a warning, it might be 
found in the first Napoleon, — a man w T ho combined 
the greatest talents with the greatest opportunities, 
and who perverted both to the purposes of his 
own base and selfish ambition, till all Europe had 
to combine against him, and he was sent to pine 
and die on a lonely island, and to spend his last 
miserable days in a characteristic attempt at fal- 
sifying history. Nothing so marks the intrinsic 
meanness of Bonaparte as the fact that he was a 
boundless liar. His baseness and his selfishness 
were equalled only by his military genius. 1 He 

1 Even in warfare he was a barbarian. " He owed a great part 
of his success to the fact that he never hesitated at any expenditure 



32 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

exhausted and ruined France, and opened the way 
to the equally base and selfish rule of his exceed- 
ingly small and contemptible nephew and the 
crew of knaves and rascals who made him their 
stalking-horse. The two men will be forever gib- 
beted in the pages of history as among her most 
odious criminals and her most impressive warn- 
ings to the people not to put their trust in any, 
even the most brilliant, leaders in whom patriotism 
and principle are wanting. And it seems to me to 
be a good omen for the success of popular govern- 
ment in this country that however often in their 
ignorance the American people may be deceived 
by plausible demagogues, their reputation seems so 
soon to collapse, no matter what may be their abil- 
ities, when once their real character is detected. 

I have been reading this summer of a very dif- 
ferent kind of politician, — a man who was brought 
into political life because he was a born leader, 
and who, if his life had been spared, would proba- 
bly have played a great part in English history. 
It was the man who in the year 1630 dared to stand 
up in the British Parliament and take the lead of 

of men to carry a position or obtain any other advantage ; so that 
General Moreau was wont to call him ' a conqueror at the rate of 
ten thousand men per hour.' " (Molinari, Involution politique, 
p. 289, note.) 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 33 

those who were risking all they held dear in a de- 
termined attempt to curb the despotic tyranny of 
the Stuart king. When Charles threw these leaders 
into prison, the most sought escape by retracting 
and asking forgiveness ; and this man might have 
done so too, and by what seemed a slight conces- 
sion might have regained his liberty and been ap- 
parently restored to his place again. But he very 
well knew that to make such a concession would 
have been to give up the whole cause of freedom, 
and that though by it he would have been out- 
wardly restored to his place, his whole power would 
have gone from him. Not a word would he re- 
tract. " He was still in the prime of life," says the 
latest and best historian of these times, " only 
thirty-eight years of age, when liberty is sweet. 
But, like Luther at Worms, it was not in him to 
do otherwise than he did. A word of submission 
would have set him free to revisit his Cornish home 
and the dear ones it contained. That word he would 
not speak." x He stayed in prison, and slowly 
died of the hardships inflicted by the pitiless ma- 
lignity of Charles ; and Charles, by leaving him 
there to perish, signed, though he did not know it, 
his own death-warrant. The scaffold in front of 

1 Gardiner, vii. 120. 
3 



34 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

the banqueting-house at Whitehall began to rise 
when Sir John Eliot died in the Tower; and the 
liberties of England were saved. A gulf wide as 
that between heaven and hell lies between the 
martyr-hero of the English and the great brigand 
of the French Revolution. 

If we had not had such men in this country we 
should have had no country. I do not know how 
far Washington was ambjtious, but I have no doubt 
that he felt conscious of the possession of great 
powers, and of the pleasure of exercising them on 
a great and conspicuous field ; but how sternly 
he subordinated himself and all selfish considera- 
tions to his patriotic duty, we all know. And noth- 
ing but this perfect disinterestedness gave him the 
patience and perseverance that were needed to 
overcome his gigantic difficulties ; for his greatest 
difficulties lay not among his avowed enemies, but 
in selfishness, confusion, and contradiction at home. 
Washington was not a great genius. In point of 
intellectual endowment he pannot be compared with 
Bonaparte, and even less in point of military genius. 
There were men, like Hamilton, among his com- 
patriots who were intellectually greater than he. 
But there was not one among them on whom the 
burden could have rested as it rested on him, who 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 35 

could have made himself the pivot on which all 
things turned, the rallying-point to which all men 
looked because of his unswerving disinterested- 
ness, his infinite patience, his absolute patriotism 
and self-forgetfulness. And I submit that in the 
sense in which Washington was a politician we 
must all, each in his little sphere, be politicians 
too, if we are to maintain the liberty for which 
he fought. 

We have just erected a statue here in Boston — 
and no statue that we can raise will add greater dig- 
nity to our city — to a man who was all his life 
nothing but a poor printer. I have been often in 
his dingy office, for I had the happiness and honor 
of knowing him. He was only a poor printer; but 
among the men of recent times the country owes to 
none a deeper debt. Garrison had great abili- 
ties, — powers that might have given him wealth in 
one direction, political office and political distinc- 
tion if he had taken another. He deliberately sac- 
rificed all such prospects to one great disinterested 
patriotic task. He remained poor, and toiled on 
through a long life simply to free his country from 
the devouring cancer of slavery; and no man of 
his generation had a nobler or a happier life. He 
was not a great orator, not a great writer ; but yet 



36 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

no man wielded a greater influence. Like Washing- 
ton before him, he was the pivot on which a great 
movement turned. His power lay in those memor- 
able words, — they have been fitly engraved on the 
pedestal of his statue, — "I am in earnest; I will 
not equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will not re- 
treat a single inch; and I will be heard. " And 
such men when they head a great movement are 
always heard. 

And with him was one of the greatest orators, if 
not the very greatest, America has yet produced, — 
a man born for political life because born to sway 
multitudes by the magic of unsurpassed eloquence. 
If Wendell Phillips could have paltered with his 
principles just far enough to open to him the doors 
of Congress, he would have had before him the 
field for the exercise of his powers which such a 
man must covet most. He could not palter with 
his principles, and those doors were forever shut. 
But he did not the less devote those matchless 
powers to an ungrateful cause, a cause in which 
for years he met with nothing but obloquy and 
abuse. With ample means for self-indulgence, 
he lived the simplest life. He gave all he was and 
all he had to what he esteemed the best and high- 
est public objects. I think he was often mistaken, 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 37 

especially in his later years. I think his objects 
were often chimerical, and his aims misdirected, 
for he lacked the calmness of judgment and perfect 
balance of mind of his great colleague; but no 
one could doubt his perfect disinterestedness. 
And how infinitely small the selfish herd of polit- 
ical time-servers looks beside either of these men ! 
How petty mere personal ambition, even an honest 
one, appears ! 

And yet I am perfectly aware that the world's 
political work cannot always be carried on by saints 
and heroes, and that in ordinary times honest polit- 
ical ambition is a good working force. There is 
no more reason why a man who feels that he has a 
gift for it should not enter the service of the State 
than why he should not go into law or into com- 
merce. There is a great deal of honest political 
work to be done for the public, such as calls forth 
the best talents of the ablest men. How shall such 
men be appointed, and not spoilsmen and carpet- 
baggers, time-servers and rogues? Here is where 
our quiet man's duty comes in who does not like 
politics, — a duty not to be shirked or avoided, 
a duty which cannot be delegated. And for this 
plain reason, — in every State there is a ruling 
force, and in the long run that ruling force is the 



38 THE STUDY OF POLITICS 

same in every State and under every form of gov- 
ernment. Somewhere there is a political centre of 
gravity represented by the word " sovereignty," — a 
word we shall have to examine very closely by and 
bye. Now where with us does that sovereignty 
avowedly reside? Not in President or Cabinet or 
Congress or Legislature or Governor. These are 
all merely instruments, the wheels and cranks of 
the political machine, not its governing force. 
That impelling force is public opinion. Even under 
a despotism it makes itself felt ; but in a republic 
like ours it is avowedly the ruling force, and our 
political machinery is constructed expressly to give 
it efficiency. Now, what is public opinion? It is 
your opinion and mine. If then you and I are 
rascals, it is plain that like will choose like, and 
the community will have rogues to govern it; or 
if you and I are cowards, it is plain that some dar- 
ing rogue will get the control of us ; or if you and 
I are stupidly ignorant, that some cunning knave 
will know how to take advantage of our ignorance. 
Look at the stuff that is crammed down the throats 
of ignorant voters by political demagogues, — of 
whom we have had, alas ! only too perfect speci- 
mens in Massachusetts. The only parallel to polit- 
ical is medical quackery. I spent some time last 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 39 

summer in a country village, and one day I amused 
myself as I waited for a purchase by examining 
the labels of the quack medicines which were 
arranged in a formidable row on the shelves of the 
village shopkeeper, and w T hich bear such melan- 
choly testimony to the practical inefficiency of our 
popular education. The exhibition would have 
been amusing if one could forget all the mischief 
and misery that lay behind it. Here is one label 
which I had the curiosity to copy: " The com- 
ponent parts of this remedy are Bromine, Iodine, 
Chlorine, Calcium, Magnesium, Iron, Sodium, and 
Potassium. To these we have added from the veg- 
etable world Rumex, Dulcamara, Stillingia, Lappa, 
Taraxacum, and Menispermum." Imagine un- 
lucky invalids swallowing that ! Of course it was 
all a lie, and the contents of the bottle were prob- 
ably bad rum. So the political quack's oration 
might be said to be bad political rum flavored with 
high-sounding phrases, — " money of the people," 
" rights of labor," " bloated bondholders," and the 
like, — political Taraxacum, Dulcamara, Calcium. 
The gaping audience does not know the meaning 
of the outlandish words, but think they represent 
profound political wisdom. 

Is it not plain, then, that you and I and our quiet 



40 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

friend who dislikes meddling with politics, if we 
are not to fall a prey to rogues and demagogues, 
must bestir ourselves to do our political duty; and 
in order that it may be done effectually, must pos- 
sess political knowledge? In other words, is it not 
plain that the citizens of a republic must receive a 
sound political education, or the republic will never 
be safe? 

What we call " law " and " government " are only 
the embodiment of the instincts and the will of the 
community as to the organization of its social re- 
lations ; and it makes a great difference as to the 
whole course of our after speculation which of 
those two views we adopt which I noticed at the 
beginning as to what constitutes the real unit of 
society. If you start with the individual as the 
unit, the problem presents itself thus, — the state 
of nature is a state of perfect individual freedom ; 
but for the sake of order and the common good 
the individual surrenders a portion of his native 
freedom to the community. The less he surren- 
ders of this natural right to do as he pleases, the 
better. Government from this point of view is 
a necessary evil, to be reduced to the lowest 
terms that are compatible with the preservation 
of order; and that community is happiest that 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 41 

is governed least. The first thing to be looked 
after is the liberty of the individual, which be- 
fore all things must be protected by a stringent 
Bill of Rights. 

This is the famous doctrine of the social contract, 
which implicitly or avowedly underlies a great part 1 
of the political writing of the last century, — the 
doctrine of sober John Locke in England, the doc- 
trine with w T hich Rousseau in France set the Euro- 
pean world on fire, the doctrine which Jefferson 
borrowed from Rousseau 1 and embodied in our 
Declaration of Independence. It is the view which 
is necessarily uppermost in times of revolution, 
when the pressing problem of the day is to free 
men from bondage to a government that has 
proved false to its duties, and grown rotten and 
corrupt. But in such times there is danger of 
carrying this so-called democratic doctrine a great 
deal too far, and to confound emancipation from 
tyranny and corruption, which is a legitimate 
object, with freedom from legitimate restraint. 
The cure for this false view is the doctrine that is 
superseding the social-contract philosophy, which 

1 The doctrine is much older than Rousseau in France, or 
Hobbes and Locke in England ; it -was the doctrine of Epicurus. 
See Prof. Wallace's capital little book on Epicureanism, p. 158. 



42 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

was but an artificial theory at best, — the evolu- 
tionary doctrine ; namely, which begins with the 
principle that the individual is not the unit of 
political discussion, but some form, however simple, 
of social organization ; in other words, that man, 
as Aristotle said long ago, is by nature a social 
creature. 1 

Rousseau's noble savage proves to be anything 
but the ideal of manhood and the model of all 
independence, but rather .the greatest of slaves, — 
the slave of his tribe, of his king, of his priest; the 
slave of superstition, the slave of his own unbridled 
lusts and passions. It is not by greater freedom, 
but by more and more complicated organization 
that he is emancipated from all this tyranny. Will 
it turn out that the individual is freest who is gov- 

1 In the " Politics " Aristotle not only contrasts law with com- 
pact, but seems everywhere to imply that the State neither came 
into being by way of compact, nor is dependent on compact for its 
authority. It began in the blind impulses which first formed the 
household, and broadened then into wider aims, which nothing but 
the State could satisfy. It glided imperceptibly into existence as 
men became necessarily aware of the various needs bound up with 
their nature. Men could not choose but form it, or some imperfect 
substitute for it. It is as much a necessity of human existence as 
food or fire. Its authority rests on the same basis as the authority 
of the father, not on consent, but on the constitution of human 
nature. — W. L. Newman: The Politics of Aristotle. I?itroduction, 
vol. i. p. 27. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 43 

erned most, provided he is well governed? It is 
at least worth inquiry; for it is apparent that as 
society develops, more, and not less, government is 
necessary. 

But now are we not in danger of being carried 
to the opposite extreme ; for will not this doctrine, 
that the State is supreme, sanction tyranny; and is 
it not to emancipate the world from tyranny that 
patriots in all ages have fought and died? It is 
a very common view to take of history that it is 
first and foremost the story of a struggle to eman- 
cipate men from the bonds of tyrannical govern- 
ments. But where did the tyrannical governments 
come from? Did the devil make the world, and 
begin with setting tyrants over it? No, God made 
the world ; and such tyranny as there has been is 
but the corruption and decay of what was rela- 
tively good in the beginning. This mistaken view 
of history arises from our inveterate but very 
natural tendency to look only at the sensational 
parts of history. Happy, it has been said, is a 
nation that has no 'history, — as if wars and convul- 
sions constituted history ! But the only nation 
that has no history is a dead nation. Growth is 
slow and silent; it is only revolutions that make a 
noise. The oak grows silently for a hundred years, 



44 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

and then comes down with a crash in a thunder- 
storm; but do the crash and the thunder-storm 
constitute its history? No doubt the story of revo- 
lution is picturesque, and picturesque in proportion 
to its suddenness and violence. But revolution is 
violent change ; and how can we understand it un- 
less we first understand the thing changed? To 
understand the French Revolution you must study 
carefully the organization and history of that 
French monarchy that was the slow growth of a 
thousand years, and that had once been the best 
form of government the condition of the French 
people admitted. 

Now, it is of far more importance to the student 
of politics and history that he should understand 
the dull story of the rise and growth of that French 
monarchy than that he should know all about the 
precise way in which it came to the ground. It 
degenerated, as all things human do, and grew into 
an intolerable tyranny, and the time came for its 
destruction ; but the instructive part of the story is 
not the story of its destruction, but the history of 
its growth. That gigantic and unprincipled bri- 
gand Bonaparte, who looms so largely in so many 
books, is a comparatively insignificant factor in 
French history. It was not he who framed the 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 45 

Code Napoleon; that lying name is only one of 
the monuments of his baseness. The builder-up 
of Prussia, the patriotic statesman Von Stein whom 
he hated so, is a far greater character. Bonaparte 
was but a civilized kind of Tamerlane or Zinghis 
Khan. A man of very mean and low type may 
play the part of a great destroyer ; it takes but a 
low kind of talent to be successful in smashing 
things : genius is shown in building them up. But 
building-up is a slow, dull, unromantic process ; it 
deals with legislation and taxation, the regulation 
of trade and the promotion of education. To 
understand it you must rummage the statute-book, 
and fag over debates and documents and budget- 
speeches and treatises on finance and everything 
that is uninteresting. But it is pretty much so in 
all study. Your chemistry does not consist in a 
series of explosions and the exhibition of blue- 
lights; your physics is not the production of a 
series of startling surprises by turning the handles 
of brass and mahogany apparatus. The study of 
science is everywhere the study of the apparently 
dull and insignificant. But what appears insignifi- 
cant to the vulgar eye, — a slight variation, a little 
change in the behavior of a compound or the 
result of an experiment, ■ — is of deepest significance 



46 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

to the instructed. I cannot offer you any better 
entertainment in the real study of politics. If you 
would really understand them you must buckle 
down to dull work until the dulness becomes in- 
teresting. If you are satisfied with political fire- 
works, there are plenty of sensational histories ; but 
remember that looking at fireworks is not studying 
science. 

But in insisting, as I thus am doing, on the rights 
of government, that is, of society, as against in- 
dividual rights, I run the risk of appearing the 
advocate of despotic power, and am taking the 
unpopular side ; especially the side sure to be un- 
popular with young men. What becomes, you ask 
me, of all the glorification of our Revolutionary 
fathers' fighting for liberty; ought they not to 
have patiently submitted to King George? What 
becomes of the immortal doctrine of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, that all men are born free 
and equal? What becomes of the long Bills of 
Rights which our fathers, from the time of Magna 
Charta down to the time of the Massachusetts 
Constitution, have been continually drawing up? 
What becomes of the cause for which Hampden 
fought, and Sidney laid down his head on the 
scaffold? What is meant, in short, by "liberty"? 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 47 

I answer that whatever may be meant by " liberty/' 
one thing is plain, — that it cannot be the individual 
liberty of every man to do as he pleases, because 
wherever the advocates of freedom have been suc- 
cessful, their success has been immediately and of 
necessity followed by the reorganization of gov- 
ernment; so that the struggle for liberty has 
never been a struggle between government on the 
one hand, and individuals on the other, but be- 
tween the supporters of some old form of organi- 
zation that was passing away, and those of some 
newer one that was supplanting it, — between, that 
is, two different forms of government. The hide- 
ous reigns of terror that sometimes intervene be- 
tween the breaking up of the old organization and 
the formation of the new are illustrations of what 
takes place when the bonds of social order are 
once broken, and every man is left free to do what 
seems right in his own eyes. And if a society 
thus develops by the replacement by new and 
better forms of old and worn-out ones, — sometimes 
by slow and peaceful growth, sometimes through 
violent revolution, — it is very true that individual 
liberty is the gainer; but we must see in what 
sense this assertion can be made. It is not that 
the new political form is of necessity simpler than 



48 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

the old one, leaving a larger space to individual 
action, because it reserves a smaller sphere for the 
activity of the social organism as a whole. On the 
contrary, governments grow more complicated as 
society develops, touch men's individual liberty 
and restrain their individual actions on a greater 
number of points ; and yet, on the whole, it is 
no paradox to say that the individual has more 
freedom. 

True freedom, therefore, is something very differ- 
ent from the absence of restraint; and Sir James 
Stephen seems to me to be right when he says : 
" Discussions about liberty are in truth discussions 
about a negation. Attempts to solve the problems 
of government and society by such discussions are 
like attempts to discover the nature of light and 
heat by inquiries into darkness and cold. The 
phenomenon which requires and will repay study 
is the direction and nature of the various forces, 
individual and collective, which in their combina- 
tion or collision with each other and with the 
outer world make up human life. If we want to 
know what ought to be the size and position of a 
hole in a water-pipe, we must consider the nature 
of water, the nature of pipes, and the objects for 
which the water is wanted ; but we shall learn very 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 49 

little by studying the nature of holes. Their shape 
is simply the shape of whatever bounds them ; 
their nature is merely to let the water pass; and 
it seems to me that enthusiasm about them is al- 
together thrown away Discussions, " he 

adds, " about liberty are either misleading or 
idle, unless we know who wants to do what, by 
what restraint he is prevented from doing it, and 
for what reasons it is proposed to remove that 
restraint." 1 

There seems to me to be so much justice in this 
view that the most enthusiastic advocate of free- 
dom can hardly refuse to accept it ; and if we pro- 
ceed to apply these limitations, w T e shall soon find 
out the circumstances under which enthusiasm for 
liberty is legitimate. The history of every country 
presents great crises, where the highest duty of 
every citizen was to fight for freedom even against 
all the constituted authorities that claimed his 
obedience ; and it is according to the success or 
failure of these revolts that a nation has grown 
great and prospered, or decayed and perished. 
And these great crises are so picturesque and so 
full of stirring events that, as I have said before, 

1 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, 1st ed., p. 181. I am far 
from agreeing with all the authors views. 

4 



50 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

they are very apt to draw attention away from 
the duller parts of the story, and to constitute for 
the superficial reader the whole of history. Mr. 
Motley's lively account of the revolt of the Nether- 
lands has a hundred readers for one patient student 
of the whole story, — the rise to greatness of the 
Dutch people, of which that revolt was only a bril- 
liant episode. We read the story of the origin of 
our own nation as if war with the mother-country 
were the beginning and* end of it ; and certainly 
to boys, and to readers who never get beyond the 
boyish view of history, the story of marches and 
battles is far more entertaining than the dull study 
of legislation. And yet after war must come legis- 
lation; after the military commander, the finan- 
cier and the economist. Liberty first ; but liberty 
to do what? Why, liberty to impose new restraints 
and form new governments, that is all; not the 
liberty of anarchy. 

Individual liberty and governmental constraint 
may be compared to the centrifugal and centripe- 
tal forces that together keep the planets in their 
orbits. If the former were to act unchecked, the 
particles of matter would fly asunder and the 
whole solar system go to pieces ; if the latter, all 
the separate members would be crushed into an 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 5 I 

immovable mass. In the same way the anarchy 
of unchecked individualism may be contrasted 
with the stagnant immobility of an unchecked 
despotic power that leaves no freedom to its sub- 
jects to be or to grow. The aim of all good govern- 
ment is to produce such an equilibrium between 
the two forces as will allow of the greatest individual 
freedom that is compatible with the most energetic 
action of the whole ; and that energetic action of 
the whole can only be brought about by the sever- 
est repression of that liberty of the individual which 
is incompatible with the true interests of the com- 
munity. It is no paradox, therefore, to say that 
the freest state will also be the most despotic, and 
that the evils of a despotism are not that it is des- 
potic, but that its despotic power is exerted in 
wrong directions and for other than public aims. 
Who would complain of a despotic power that 
checked him from rushing headlong over a preci- 
pice? Xo one complains that government — that 
is, society — is too strong when its force is exercised 
in wise directions, that the public order is too 
orderly, that the community is too safe, that its 
highways are too well made, and its bridges never 
break down. The only questions that can arise 
are as to the limits of its proper functions. This 



52 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

indeed is at all times one of the capital problems 
of practical political science, but one which, from 
its very nature, admits of no final and definite so- 
lution ; for the answer must vary with time, place, 
and circumstance, and the question gives rise to 
a discussion whose range is limited only by the 
extravagances of Communism on the one hand, 
and on the other by the individualism-run-mad of 
Thoreau, who from his shanty by Walden Pond 
proclaims the doctrine that " men are degraded 
when considered as members of a political organi- 
zation. " But as the wisest of English political 
philosophers says : "The science of constructing a 
commonwealth, or renovating it or reforming it, is, 
like every other experimental science, not to be 
taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that 
can instruct us in that practical science." * 

Accordingly, it will be found that the question 
of liberty is uppermost only in times of revolution ; 
that is, in times when the existing governmental 
machinery has either become insufficient to do the 
increasing public work, or when it has broken down 
from age and imperfection. There always was a 
time when it was good enough, and the best that 
could be desired. The French Revolution did not 
1 Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 53 

come because the old French monarchy had al- 
ways been rotten and corrupt; on the contrary, 
France had grown under it into a great and power- 
ful nation. It was the very growth of the nation 
that the monarchy had fostered that at last pro- 
duced its overthrow; for the nation grew while the 
monarchy remained immovable. There was no 
talk of the claims of individual freedom so long as 
individuals had all the freedom they wanted. But 
institutions were not elastic ; they would not yield 
to the increasing power of the centrifugal force, 
the growth of which they themselves had promoted ; 
and so they were burst asunder, and out of their 
ruins a larger structure grew. And the process was 
one full of confusion, misunderstanding, bloodshed, 
and suffering; and unless it is for the purpose of 
detecting the new principles that are working them- 
selves out into light and clearness, they are not the 
most instructive periods to study. The most pro- 
fitable periods are those of peaceful progress un- 
der institutions that satisfy the wants of the people. 
You can apply the same principles to our Revolu- 
tion. It was not till our fathers came to feel wants 
which could not be met by the government of Eng- 
land that they felt it to be oppressive. They were 
contented and loyal while they were small. But 



54 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

when the increasing demands of a growing com- 
munity were not met, and could not be met, by a 
government three thousand miles away, they nat- 
urally began to long for independence. But it was 
not an individual independence — which is anarchy 
— that they fought for, but only a freedom to or- 
ganize a new government, which in large measure 
is exactly like the one they left. The difference is 
that under it the centrifugal and centripetal forces 
can be better adjusted, and both can have freer 
play. There can be more of individual freedom, 
while at the same time there is a better adjusted 
governmental control. 

A struggle for liberty, therefore, is always in the 
hands of its true lovers, as contrasted with Anar- 
chists and Nihilists, a struggle for more individual 
freedom through a better organization of society ; 
while the Anarchist and Nihilist struggle for freedom 
through the destruction of society itself. The An- 
archist, driven wild, perhaps, by the tyranny of some 
obsolete despotism like that of Russia, can think 
only of his individual rights ; the temperate lover 
of freedom will be just as ardent in his hatred of 
tyranny, but will think more of his individual 
duties. The latter will therefore reach his aim 
more surely, because he will not believe that anar- 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 55 

chy is the road to better order, or that the way to 
real freedom is through blowing up emperors with 
dynamite. 

It would seem, then, from all I have said, that it 
is a very mistaken view of political science and 
political history to look upon them as the mere 
story of a struggle between freedom and despotism, 
as if there were always two hostile parties on the 
scene, — the people on the one hand, oppressed and 
clamoring for their rights, and an enemy on the 
other, called government, whose chief function it 
was to oppress them. You might as well say that 
a steam-engine was made up of an oppressed ele- 
ment called steam, struggling for its freedom 
against an enemy called a boiler, that made a slave 
of it to turn a lot of wheels. The governmental 
structure is the boiler and engine that turn the 
tremendous social energy to use, which without 
them would be dissipated in thin air. The machine 
may be very rude and clumsy, so as to utilize only 
a fraction of the force ; or it may be weak and de- 
fective, constantly breaking down and getting out 
of repair ; or it may be antiquated, and far behind 
the best ideas, wanting in all newly invented im- 
provements : but at its very worst it is better than 
no machine at all. Its defects are a good reason 



56 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

for improving it, but it can never be so bad as not 
to be better than none ; and even though we should 
admit that it may utterly break down, it would have 
to be instantly replaced by a new one. The gov- 
ernment of Turkey is perhaps as bad as a govern- 
ment can conceivably be ; but the government of 
Turkey itself is better than anarchy. We shall have 
a far truer view of political science if we put aside 
this antithesis between government and people, 
and, using the language of the day, define it as the 
science of social evolution. How far the word " so- 
cial " is, and how far it is not, a wider term than the 
word "political," we shall see by and bye; if we 
choose to limit the meaning of the word " political," 
let us call political science one branch of the 
science of social evolution. Taken in its widest 
extent, it would embrace the study of all forms of 
political organization from the earliest times and 
among all the races and tribes of men, from the 
rudest up to the most civilized, — a vast field, which 
the sociologists of our day are very busy in culti- 
vating, and about which the newest books have 
accumulated a mass of extremely interesting ma- 
terial. Viewed in this light, it is a branch of 
anthropology, or the study of the natural history 
of man. But for more practical purposes the study 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 57 

narrows itself greatly. Practical political science 
needs to trouble itself very little with any but the 
Aryan family of man, or with the histories of any 
branches even of that family save the European 
branches since their migration into Europe. Prac- 
tical political science begins with the study of the 
political institutions of the Greeks and Romans as 
they appear in the earliest records of these peoples, 
and is virtually one continuous story from the laws 
of Solon and the Twelve Tables down to the Decla- 
ration of Independence and the last English Reform 
Bill, 1 — how vast and complicated a story, you had 
some opportunity to see last year. Now we may 
begin the study at either end : we may begin with 
the germs of all European political institutions at 
their very first appearance, and trace them step by 
step downwards through all the phases of their 
evolution, or we may begin with the last and most 
complete result, — say the United States or the Brit- 
ish Constitution, — and examine all its complex de- 
tails, without caring anything about its history or 
its origin. So you may begin with Watt's first 
rude steam-engine, and study step by step each 

1 See on this point Freeman's excellent lecture on the Unity of 
History. But see also the strictures of Bishop Stubbs, Lectures 
on Mediaeval and Modern History, p. 83. 



58 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

addition and improvement, till you come to the 
latest result, whatever it may be, a Corliss or the 
great machine that propels the biggest and newest 
Cunarder across the ocean ; and you may besides 
study the innumerable varieties that have arisen 
from the countless applications of the same princi- 
ples to different purposes, — I say you may begin 
with the rudest and simplest machine, and trace 
all this historically; or you may begin at the 
other end, and study the fully developed engine. 
Each method has its advantages, and the best is a 
mixture of both ; for we can hardly understand 
things as they are without some knowledge at least 
of where they came from. In political science the 
historical method of study has of late taken the 
place of all others. 

And when, confining ourselves to Aryan and 
European political institutions, we come to look at 
them historically, we find that in the midst of all 
the seeming confusion and infinity of detail there 
is great simplicity; and as a few and the same 
fundamental principles of mechanics and physics 
govern equally the construction of Watt's rude 
engine and its most elaborate improvement, so a 
few fundamental principles are at the foundation 
equally of the political organization of Homer's 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 59 

Greeks or republican Romans, or our ancestors in 
the forests of Germany; and the United States 
Constitution is only an elaboration of a Greek 
republic, and a British parliament a development 
of an assembly of Teutonic warriors. To give an 
illustration, Mr. Freeman says: "It is shown be- 
yond doubt in the writings of the founders of the 
Constitution of the United States that they had no 
knowledge of the real nature of the Federal Con- 
stitution of the Achaian League (between 300 and 
400 B. c). But two sets of commonwealths widely 
removed from one another in time and place found 
themselves in circumstances essentially the same. 
The later Federal Union was therefore cast in a 
shape which in several points presents a likeness 
to the elder one, — a likeness which is all the 
more striking and instructive because it was most 
certainly undesigned. Washington and Hamilton 
had only faint notions that they were doing the 
same work which had been done twenty ages 
before by Markos of Kyreneia and Aratos of 
Sikyon, but they did the work all the same." x 

I am aware that I am propounding a very old- 
fashioned kind of politics, — a doctrine that is quite 
at variance with a good deal of political specu- 

1 Comparative Politics, p. 33. 



60 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

lation that is popular at the present day. That 
speculation is based on the modern doctrine of 
evolution which is so completely transforming the 
whole study of physical science. Is there room 
for the application of this doctrine to history? I 
have already indicated my belief that there is. I 
think that the doctrine of evolution is destined to 
work as great a transformation in the study of 
history as in the study of physical science, and 
that it furnishes, rightly interpreted, a true key to 
the origin of society, and a solid foundation for 
a true science of politics. But the evolutionary 
theory that is to do this must, in my judgment, 
be very different from most of the sociological 
systems of to-day, — it must be an evolutionary 
theory, as I profoundly believe, that shall fully 
recognize the existence of God and the free-will of 
man as two of its fundamental postulates. Far 
different from this are all evolutionary doctrines 
that end in any kind of materialistic fatalism. 
Mr. Buckle, for instance, in his famous book on 
Civilization in England — though it is hard to say 
what is the doctrine of so inconsistent a writer — in 
theory at least is such a fatalist. There is a con- 
stant average, says Mr. Buckle, of so many suicides 
in the course of a year, so many murders, so many 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 6 1 

misdirected letters, and so on. History is the 
science of getting at these averages. Progress 
does not depend upon morality. One generation 
is about as moral as another, and moral precepts 
were understood a thousand years ago just as well 
as now. All progress is intellectual, and steam- 
engines and telegraphs are the great reformers. 
You can see that this is the sort of evolutionary 
doctrine that would naturally arise in this age of 
many inventions. No sane man will dispute their 
importance ; but a nation that is tempted to rely 
upon steam-engines instead of statesmen will not 
last long, for history teaches no lesson more im- 
pressively than the perishableness of mere material 
prosperity. A great city may very easily be 
changed into a howling wilderness. The splendor 
of London and Paris is not greater than was the 
splendor of Babylon and Nineveh. Old Rome, the 
greatest of ancient cities, js a heap of crumbling 
ruins, and Italy, that once ruled the world, became 
for centuries the prey of her stronger neighbors. 
I read in Bayard Taylor's travels in India the other 
day a striking account of a deserted city he visited 
there, — palaces and temples of most exquisite ar- 
chitecture all so perfect that they might with little 
labor be occupied again ; but all solitary and 



62 THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 

deserted, the haunt of the wolf and the jackal, the 
monuments of a grandeur that has utterly passed 
away. A day's bombardment of a single ironclad 
would lay our Boston in ruins. Whether Boston 
should be built up again would depend, not upon 
any fatalistic laws, but upon the question whether 
she contained men % — citizens like those of Athens 
described by Pericles in his Funeral Oration, of 
whom he says: "An Athenian citizen does not 
neglect the State because he takes care of his own 
household ; and even those of us who are engaged 
in business have a fair idea of politics. We alone 
regard a man who takes no interest in public af- 
fairs, not as harmless, but as a useless character; 
and if few of us are originators, we are all sound 
judges of policy. The great impediment to action 
is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of 
that knowledge which is gained by discussion, 
preparatory to action. " \ Have we gained much 
on this ideal of a citizen of a free republic in 
the thirteen centuries since those words were 
uttered ? 

For, after all, — and it is with this moral that I will 
conclude, — it is men that make a State. 

1 Thucydides, Jowett's translation, vol. i. p. 119. 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 63 

"What constitutes a State ? 
Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 

Thick wall or moated gate ; 
Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned; 

Not bays and broad-armed ports 
Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride ; 

Not starred and spangled courts 
Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride. 

No ! men, high-minded men, 
With powers as far above dull brutes endued, 

In forest brake or den 
As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude, — 

Men who their duties know, 
Who know their rights, and knowing dare maintain. 

These constitute a State; 
And sovereign law, that State's collected will, 

O'er thrones and globes elate, 
Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill." 



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